Benefits News
Getting on the same page
By Lydell C. Bridgeford

December 1, 2007 -Web-based technology has revolutionized HR delivery capabilities for most employers, especially in administering health and retirement benefits. Overall, companies are satisfied that 21st century technology has allowed them to improve efficiency and increase transparency with the delivery of those benefits.

But one area where HR technology and employers are trying to get on the same page is with talent management. Consulting firm Watson Wyatt recently released a survey that showed employers are less satisfied with HR delivery rooted in talent management than with retirement and health care benefits administration.

For example, 21% of employers are somewhat or very dissatisfied with the quality of talent management services offered, versus 10% in the health and welfare area and 6% in defined benefit plan administration, Watson Wyatt reports.

More than 'just a user ID and password'
"Too many organizations approach HR technology and talent management with the premise that all you need to do is give workers a user ID and password, and everything will be fine," says Jim Lanzalotto, vice president of strategy and marketing at Pennsylvania-based Yoh, a talent and outsourcing services provider. "Well, that's not the case. It's about integrating offline and online activities," he remarks.

In the last five years, the market has seen a variety of HR technologies aimed at talent management by solving individual problems, basically onepoint solutions.

Lanzalotto says employers have to ask how best to coordinate online solutions, so that they don't have to work in 10 different applications.

Online solutions for talent management are relatively new, compared to Web-based technology aimed at health and retirement plans. The lack of technology associated with talent management may suggest why employers are unhappy in that arena. In addition, some key components of talent management do not fall within the purview of HR.

Nevertheless, industry analysts contend that HR technology for talent management programs is developing quickly, as more companies are beginning to recognize that talent management is an area where they could probably do better in bringing in the right software tools.

Web-based administration aligned with talent management programs simply allows employers to streamline paper and homemade spreadsheets.

Strategically implementing online platforms for talent management programs can help organizations to attract, develop, retain and utilize individuals possessing the required skills and aptitude that will allow a company to meet business objectives and improve workplace productivity.

With performance administration, online technology permits an employer to distinguish high-performing workers from low-performing workers more efficiently.

Additionally, workers and their managers have a central repository where they can review the annual performance goals and the benchmarks to those goals.

Experts say employers want HR technology to centralize and streamline all of those processes and systems into solutions that allow the measures to talk to one another.

Online systems tracking talent and performance make it more efficient for companies to achieve business objectives and to staff projects based on their budgets.

Making talent objectives reflect business goals
Talent management is even more complex now that more employers are globalizing their operations.

For example, says Cameron Tew, manager of publishing and research operations at North Carolina-based Best Practices, LLC, a managementconsulting firm,"when you talk about Boeing, you are not just referring to a Seattle-based company. It's all over the world."

If employers leverage HR technology with talent management programs, Tew explains, organizations must be mindful that new systems must have the ability to easily share information across their entire employee population. "This way they are able to stay on top of their entire talent pool, which is the whole idea of talent management," he says.

Organizations have high-tech systems to track inventory, so why not the same for talent, contends Steve A. Rosenthal, CEO at CheckPoint HR, a New Jersey-based company that helps small and midsize employers automate HR operations.

"Yet in most cases, one of the largest expenses in any organization is its labor. Therefore, why not have a human resource information system that tracks that as well?" he asks.

Failing to utilize a full-blown HR information system to track human capital today may mean that organizations will find it difficult to train and retain quality personnel in the future, Rosenthal says.

Talent management is one area where the technology is probably lagging behind and has not been looked into as a pressing priority at most organizations, but instead remains an afterthought, says Paul Rowson, general manager at World at Work, an Arizona-based trade association for HR professionals.

"More organizations, however, are coming to realize that, when it comes to attracting, retaining and developing workers, the new thought has to become How do we pull all of this information together?'" he explains. Employers are missing out on fully knowing where the talent is in their organization by not strategically using online solutions. "I call it optimizing your workforce," says Rowson, who runs the association's Washington, D.C. office.

For example, if an organization knows it will be reorganizing a certain division to meet new business challenges next year, then it needs to determine in a simple and effective way what skill sets are needed and where those skills are. The HR technology solutions should fit into the objectives of the reorganization, Rowson explains.

If firms fail to make that happen, they are "more likely to try to fabricate a solution without really determining whether the HR technology is meeting both the talent and business objectives."

Keep in mind, he says, technology should be easy to use for all stakeholders in talent management.

"Often, HR buys technology for HR, which means the technology meets the needs of HR, but others outside of HR may reject it. Nothing is worse than having technology that is underused or not meeting your needs," Rowson says.

What is over complicated tends to be underutilized, and then the companies tend to reduce the number of high-tech features or the value of the technology.

Meanwhile, HR technology vendors have gone through a period of realizing that some solutions succeed and other fail because the technology was overcustomized or overcomplicated, failing to reach deep down in the organization and get extensive use, Rowson says. Online solutions should allow both employees and employers to be engaged participants in the talent management process, which benefits all parties involved.